Posts tagged with Web Analytics

In the nineties and noughties, the web was talked about as more measurable than any other medium.

The idea was that attribution of sales would be completely sewn up before long. Last click analysis was duly mastered and dashboarded. However, there remain difficulties in identifying customers and tracking them as web usage has splintered across devices.

There are plenty of other issues, technical and cultural. Let’s take a look at the challenges in data analysis for marketers.

Companies are well aware of the need for digital transformation in a world where their customers are 'always online'.

Consumers are using computers, mobile devices and social platforms as integral parts of their day-to-day lives.

While technological advancements are empowering consumers, they are also creating new opportunities for businesses that can acquire and process the data from these activities and use the insights to drive decision making and action.

But according to the Econsultancy and Adobe 2014 Digital Trends report, only 23% of marketers believe they have the marketing technology they need to be successful.

This highlights the need for organisations to replace their legacy systems with technology that positions them to capitalise on current and future opportunities.

The value in web analytics comes not from the tool but from using the data it provides.

Web analytics can be an amazing driver of business performance when it's supplying insights that are used to inform business actions. For this, you need more than the technology, you need the people and the processes as well.

Let’s narrow our focus though to just the web analytics tool, whether a (technically) free solution such as Google Analytics or the paid solutions such as Adobe Analytics, Webtrends, etc.

So many companies say they are doing web analytics because they have a tool installed. Simply adding the basic page tag to your website is not enough to give you useful insights.

However the good news is that since 2012 (when 49% of companies said they were to increase their resourcing of dedicated employees) the number of companies that don’t have a dedicated analyst for web data has fallen by 4%.

More than half of businesses rely exclusively on Google Analytics (GA) for their web analytics while just 11% don’t use the tool at all, according to data included in the new Econsultancy/Lynchpin Online Measurement and Strategy Report 2013.

This is a massive increase since 2009 when just 23% of respondents said they used GA exclusively.

With GA having a reputation as both free and easy to use, and having a strong community around getting the most out of the tool, it is no surprise to see the majority use it.

The increase since 2011 could, however, be partly due to the discontinuation of Yahoo’s free analytics tool, which was used by 8% of companies and 18% of agencies last year.

Econsultancy has today published a new best practice guide aimed at companies wanting to join up online and offline data, bringing together their often separate web analytics and offline business intelligence platforms.

Below, the report's author Julian Brewer answers some questions about the widespread challenges and opportunities that inspired him to write this report.

An innumerate marketer begs the new species of click-sniffer to make a bit of an effort and translate your undisputed brilliance into some language other than Klingon or Ithkuil.

If you believe the bloggers (and who doesn't?), marketing departments all over the world are clearing out the desks of their PR, advertising and 'corporate communications' dinosaurs to make room for the new breed of data geek.

On the whole, that’s good, but data is only useful if the lessons it provides can be communicated in terms that people can understand.